Karen Chesna was born and raised in Chicago, but has been a Montana resident for the last thirty years. She received her BA in art history, with concentrations in Native American and Indigenous Art, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Upon graduation, Karen was employed by the Anthropology/Conservation Department of the Field Museum of Natural History, where she worked with the Northwest Coast Indian and Eskimo collections. During her lunch breaks she would roam the museum’s vast storage rooms, opening cabinets and drawers that revealed mysterious treasures both beautiful and odd.

Mystery has been a constant theme running through Karen’s life. She was raised in the Catholic Church where miracles, veiled tabernacles, midnight services, and candle-filled shrines were a natural part of life. Childhood summers were marked by long vacations to the rural western United States. Here she first experienced deep silence and skies heavy with stars, while time spent in the city fed her imagination with museum displays of ancient cultures and antique navigational instruments.

Karen began her art career working in the medium of fiber, which she used to construct small boxes filled with scenes and embroidered with her poems. After taking a lost-wax casting class offered by local sculptor Kay Lynn, Karen became fascinated with metal and returned to school to study metalsmithing, eventually becoming an adjunct instructor in a college professional goldsmithing program. A desire to refine and deepen her work then led her to earn an MFA in Sculpture/Metals from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She currently owns and operates Glacier Metal Arts Studio, where she teaches metalsmithing classes to students of all skill levels.

Karen’s current body of work explores the theme of mystery- the unknown and the unknowable- expressed as things hidden and things revealed. She creates sculptural jewelry, artist books, and small metal-based mixed media sculptures that reference archaeology, early science, alchemy, and old religious rites. Her pieces employ architectural elements and geometric forms, which provide a structure of order and rationality as she explores our relationship to the irrational.